The Best of Victor Borge Act One and Two (1990)
Victor Borge is one of the great clowns. Granted, he never wore clown makeup, nor a clown suit, but his approach to performance was that of a clown. He approached the world with a clown’s eye, such as when he would attempt to play music that was upside down or doing his “counting” routine. He was one of the “laugh out loud” funny performers, that the world needs more of. When it came to playing his music, however, he was serious about his art. He would bring me from laughing out loud with tears running down my face, to listening with rapt attention to his playing of classical music. Victor Borge is gone now, but thankfully we have recordings of his work, including this recording of a live performance, which has some of his best moments, and strongly recommended.
Editorial Review of The Best of Victor Borge Act One and Two, courtesy of Amazon.com
Victor Borge was a master at combining two seemingly disparate elements: comedy and classical music. While the Daneâs dapper dignity fit the image of âlonghairâ music, Borge undercut it with broad physical comedy, clever spoofs, and off-the-cuff wit. A pioneer in the field of live comedy recordings, Borge is nevertheless best appreciated on video, and The Best of Victor Borge Acts One and Two captures a 90-minute concert that includes many of his most famous routines. He chides late-arriving members of the Minneapolis audience (“I come from Copenhagen and was here before you!”), falls off the piano bench, and reads his sheet music upside down. There are a few unwitting guests: a stagehand drafted to turn Borge’s pages, soprano Marylyn Mulvey who tries to sing a Verdi aria through Borge’s teasing and scolding, and Sahan Arzruni as he and Borge play a two-piano Hungarian rhapsody on a single piano by climbing over and around each other.
Borge also presents an opera “written by Mozart but credited to Salieri” (“so you can imagine what kind of opera it is”) and proves that he’s not merely a clown by skillfully performing a set of waltzes and lullabies. In addition, two of his best-loved sketches are nonmusical: Inflationary Language, in which numbers in language, like the economy, are increased (“I’ll go back to Elevenessee…. Three-dleoo.”), and Phonetic Punctuation, in which a period is read aloud to sound like fft and an exclamation point fsss fft. Like Anna Russell and PDQ Bach, Victor Borge helped make classical music accessible to a wide audience by showing that it could be laugh-out-loud funny. —David Horiuchi